A flood of blinding light tore Tara’s soul from her body. As the light enveloped her she sped upwards at impossible speeds. She flew up, through the roof of the old train, and into the sky. She was a shooting star of orange, green, and ultraviolet, ascending along the conduit of light that continued to hurtle her through the sky.
As she shot from the surface of the earth she continued to pick up speed, ripping through the atmosphere, leaving all life behind. The longer she moved, the faster she seemed to go until she saw the earth behind her. She was in a tunnel of light now. Moving at impossible speeds, ever faster ever further.
The scene around her began to look like the warp-speed effect from old sci-fi movies, with stars streaking by in endless streams. Silence enveloped her, yet the sheer intensity of the light overwhelmed her senses. If she focused hard enough, she could faintly make out the void that lay just beyond the radiance.
“Wha…” she attempted to say, only to be met with silence. In fact, She couldn’t hear anything. There was no sound in the tunnel of light.
Tara didn’t know if it was the silence that shook her or the fact that she realized she could not speak, but she came to herself all at once.
“Where am I?” she thought to herself.
Her vision moved across the tunnel of light speeding by her, to other strange colors. Floating orbs of fire and energy. Individual twinkling lights. These orbs were of a variety of different colors, unlike the pure white tunnel against the empty expanse. These orbs were what she imagined Will-o-wisps looked like as a little girl. Floating balls of faerie fire and magic. The lights seemed to float in place, each a different hue than the last. Each one softly bobbing up and down.
Tara wished she could gasp, “What are all these things? What is going on? Where am I?” Questions raced through her mind as she peered around the silent tunnel.
“What happened?” she thought, looking down at her…
She had no hands. She has no feet. Frantically, she looked down, around, and all about her. She hummed in frustration and confusion, her light pulsing.
Wait.
She hummed? She pulsed?
Tara was a ball of light. She was floating. She was light and life itself. She didn’t know if she wanted to cry from the fact that she was now a ball of light or simply shine in shock. All of this was so confusing.
Was she dead? No, she was life. She was light. She was thinking. She was seeing things. She tried to steady her mind. It was beginning to spin. She was NOT dead though. She was alive and something she didn’t understand was going on. She just had to figure it out.
Around her, the other will-o-wisps floated—those who had also been on the train? If she was here and she was pulled from Earth, then maybe the other lights were like her. Or she was like them.
Yes. Tara hovered closer to the other lights. She could feel them. Their warmth and their color. They were like her. Humans once. Lives. Though they lacked faces, she sensed their confusion, just as she felt her own. She tried to keep calm as the tunnel’s speed seemed to increase, tilting on an axis she couldn’t comprehend. If she still had a heart, it would have been lodged in her throat.
She flitted around the two orbs next to her, trying to calm herself down. Her light shifted slightly purple and then green as she tried to soothe her worry and also communicate with the other wisps. She could tell they were afraid. She could feel it—their emotions, like drops of color in a clear glass of water.
Before she saw him, she felt him. Ken’s wisp appeared beside her, his calm essence flickering softly as he drifted closer. She couldn’t speak, everything remained silent, but his presence grounded her.
It was him. She knew it. Ken. Her husband. Her best friend. Her lover, and confidant, and somehow, he was still here with her. They were together. He made her feel less alone, and her fear ebbed slightly. If they were about to face whatever lay beyond, she found comfort in knowing she would face it with the one person she knew better than anyone. The one she could trust.
“Ken.” She wished she could say. She wished she could touch him just a little bit, even if it hurt. She tried, but she had no real form to touch him with. Yet, she stayed close to him, searching for any way to connect with him. It was him. Those reds, yellows, and silvers in his light somehow felt right. He was this light.
The tunnel seemed to pick up speed around them as they huddled close. Their lights flickering bright and soft, speeding through the tunnel of light toward an unknown destination, if there even was a destination. Maybe this tunnel was all that existed after life, but something in her gut told her otherwise.
She felt them moving toward something, though she couldn’t tell what it was. Then, the tunnel jolted, like hitting a bump on a road, sending a shock through her. Unease gripped her as a wisp farther back was destroyed, no, consumed, by a neon blackish-blue force.
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That’s when she learned she could indeed panic.
Terror gripped her as she clung to Ken’s flickering form, desperately tying herself to him, binding them together. He flashed back, holding on to her, as the dark force consumed another soul, its light snuffed out in an instant. As the entity crept closer, Tara spared a glance beyond the light. They were descending now, toward a world rippling with colors and patterns, just beyond the void.
Turning back to the encroaching darkness, she tried to flee, but before she could fully commit to the movement, she was yanked backward. The bluish energy gripped Ken. She watched in horror as he struggled against the force, pulling and tugging, but it was no use. The bluish energy was stronger.
The force grew and began to cover Ken’s light. An emptiness threatened to ruin Ken as he flashed red and silver, fighting for his light not to fade against the oppressive force. But no matter how he struggled, the bluish energy grew, devouring him.
He was going to die.
He was going to die and all she could do was watch as this wicked energy devoured Ken before it consumed her too. She felt her connection to him weakening, his light flickering more frantically with every second.
“No.”
“No!”
“NO!”
This disgusting energy wasn’t going to take Ken. Not now. Not again. She had lost everything too many times without having a say. This time, if she was going to die, it would be on her terms.
Tara hurled her light—her life—her soul at the dark energy, her light blazing with a ferocity fueled by determination. She was not going to let it take the one person who mattered most. Her feverish rage roared as she crashed into the blue and black energy.
She sparked in her anger. Her distaste and frustration for her situation boiled over. Her desire to keep her husband from being consumed caused her to rage against the bluish light. She attacked, throwing herself at the energy, buffering against her own as she shone like a thousand lighthouses.
The bluish energy recoiled as it came in contact with her brilliance, as if shocked by her attack. She didn’t relent for a moment, bombarding the darkness with her rays until Ken finally tore free. His light was weakened but still intact. He flickered softly, his wisp a little less bright than before.
“KEN!” She cried silently.
The blue light began to envelop them again, hungry. There had to be something that she could do. She stared into the void beyond and the new world below. They had to escape. “Anywhere was safer than here,” She thought, hoping that she was right.
Without wasting a second, she reached out to him, straining her illuminated form. Grasping him with all the power she had, she pushed him toward the world below, hopefully saving him. He disappeared from sight as she careened through the tunnel, into its walls as the momentum broke through and flung her into the void.
---
Kenshiro Perez awoke with cold dirt pressed against his face. He coughed, pain shooting through his head and reverberating behind his eyes. As he pushed himself up, the rough stone floor grated against his face. He put his hands to his face, trying to clear his vision in the dim light. His nose filled with something acrid and rich, like soil and ammonia.
His thoughts swirled, coming to him in fragmented pieces—lights, a tunnel of light, and darkness. Bluish danger. Tara.
“Tara!”
“Where is Tara?”
Kenshiro staggered to his feet, blood rushing to his head, making his vision swim. He steadied himself against a nearby shelf and groaned, “Tara?” Concern coated his voice as he strained to right himself and get his bearings.
He took a moment to gather himself. He had been on a train. Something happened—lights. Already, the memories of what occurred between the crash and wherever he was now were slipping away like a dream fading after waking.
Looking around, he tried to anchor himself in the present. He stood in a crowded room filled with barrels stacked two high along three of the walls, like an old distillery. Dim lanterns with bluish-green flames flickered in the corners, casting a sickly glow over the space. The air reeked of vinegar and alcohol, and the mustiness clung to his skin.
The stone walls and floor seemed to be made of the same dark material. Tools and implements—brooms, rakes, even a fire poker—littered the room. Yet, it wasn’t the smell of old whiskey or the damp air that jarred him. It was the sound of high-pitched muttering and flapping wings that snapped him from his daze.
Ken’s eyes darted to the door, where three strange bats hovered in the air. They weren’t like any bats he’d seen before. Their reddish, bulbous heads looked like demented dolls from a horror movie, and their lips smacked as if savoring something. They had small, extra sets of… hands? Claws?
As his eyes met theirs, the creatures screeched, a shrill cry filled with a bloodlust that chilled him to his core.
“HEEheheheHAH! Meat!” the creatures shrilled.
Those weren’t bats.
---
Tara floated in darkness, no longer just a floating orb of light. She had arms and legs, though she still seemed to radiate some sort of glow. She alone was the only light in the inky blackness that stretched in every direction making her question whether her eyes were open or shut as she stared into the void. She drifted there, suspended in nothingness. Whether a minute passed or a hundred years, she couldn’t tell. Time didn’t seem to exist in the void. Every second stretched into eternity, yet it didn’t frighten her.
After the fire, She had been in a coma for four months. She didn’t remember much from that time. To her, it had been a painful blur, a haze of anesthesia and medications meant to keep the pain at bay. She recalled only snippets—faces, sensations of agony—all intertwined by a feeling of floating. An empty floating. A floating not unlike this.
But unlike the coma, she remembered everything now. The tunnel, the light, the train. Pushing Ken to safety.
“Ken…”
She searched the void for him, but found nothing. Just emptiness. Reaching out with her senses, she probed deeper—into her soul. That’s when she felt it. Her connection to Ken. It was instictive. She pressed on it with her mind, as if gazing through a window.
Her mind pulled the vision from her soul into her senses. With her power, she saw Ken. Covered in blood—some his, some tinged with sulfur—as he fought for his life against three Lesser Infernal Imps.